Software Engineering vs Machine Learning Concepts

Divide and Conquer - A key technique in software engineering is to break a problem down into simpler subproblems, solve those subproblems, and then compose them into a solution to the original problem. Arguably, this is the entire job, recursively applied until the solution can be expressed in a single line in whatever programming language is being used. The canonical pedagogical example is the Tower of Hanoi. Unfortunately, in machine learning we never exactly solve a problem. At best, we approximately solve a problem.